A couple of weeks ago I happened to catch
a TV showing of New Jack City, a 1991 movie about an inner-city crack cocaine
ring and its leader, Nino Brown. Brown becomes progressively more
violent in the course of doing business, taking over a housing complex
to house his operation, taking lives and disrupting the community around
him. The movie ends with a bit of editorial commentary, that there
are Nino Browns in every city, and that sound bites and sloganeering won't
solve the problem.

The comments are all too true, and the
portrait the movie painted not exaggerated. Also in 1991, for example,
a real-life inner-city Boston-area cocaine kingpin named Darryl Whiting
was sentenced to life without parole for his deeds. Like the fictional
Brown, Whiting had also taken over a housing complex to serve as his headquarters.
Like Brown in the movie, Whiting mixed his violence and intimidation with
community philanthropy, funding community centers, concerts, barbecues
and amusement-park outings for kids. Like Brown, Whiting killed in
the course of doing business.

Though ten years old, these fictional and
real-life cases have relevance to our cities and their social pathologies
today. After all, the policies have not fundamentally changed.
Was Juan Raul Garza, executed by the federal government this week for murders
committed in the course of running a marijuana trafficking business, anything
like Brown or Whiting? Probably somewhat.

Also unchanged are the sound bites and
sloganeering of our nation's drug war cheerleaders. One of the most
prominent right now is John Ashcroft, the US Attorney General. Ashcroft
promised, on taking office, to "reinvigorate the drug war." He declined
to explain how the escalated, record level drug arrests and incarcerations
under the Clinton administration represented any lack of vigor.

Giving the go-ahead to the Garza execution,
Ashcroft claimed, based on a recent Department of Justice report, that
"[t]here is no evidence of racial bias in the administration of the federal
death penalty." Yet in saying this, he deliberately ignored glaring
statistics and serious questions raised in or about the report -- for example,
the fact that 85% of federal death row inmates are non-white, or the report's
extraordinarily weak claim that there are no caucasian drug trafficking
organizations in eastern Virginia. These are not the words of an
honest assessor and guardian of justice.

As Senator, Ashcroft was a leading drug
warrior who scoffed at those who dissented from the drug war orthodoxy.
The idea that people like Whiting and Garza are created and empowered by
our drug prohibition laws, and that ending prohibition (through enacting
some form of legalization) would reduce crime and save lives, is anathema
to Ashcroft and all live in the grip of drug war ideology.

But it is truth. Violent crime substantially
rose, then substantially fell, with the enactment and subsequent repeal
of alcohol prohibition. Though some drug warriors claim that legalization
would not reduce violence, it strains reason to think that sending hundreds
of billions of dollars into the criminal underground drug economy, as current
policies do, would not increase violence. Since prohibition clearly
increases criminal violence, ending prohibition must ultimately help to
reduce it.

None of this mitigates the guilt of those
who in the course of drug trafficking resort to murder. Yet punishing
them, through lifetime incarceration in the case of Whiting, or execution,
in the case of Garza, is a pyrrhic victory at best -- their victims are
still dead -- and raises moral issues, particularly in the case of the
death penalty, over which society does not have a true consensus.

Instead, what is needed is systemic reform
to end the power and prevalence of the illicit drug trade and stop these
terrible drug wars once and for all. To save lives, to end drug trade
corruption, to make our cities safe. To stop the violence.

That is one of many reasons why this organization
is committed to the eventual outright repeal of drug prohibition -- while
working in the present on smaller portions of the drug issue and with allies
in other movements -- but never losing sight of nor swearing off of that
goal.

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